By Movieguide® Staff
Today, American honors the servicemen and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their country. While many of these soldiers remain unknown, their patriotism continues to be a guiding force in the American military.
This legacy inspired multiple people in Hollywood, including Golden Age stars who also served our country.
“Dad had committed me to God,” actor Jimmy Stewart said of the letter his father pressed into his hand before he shipped out for Europe. “I felt the presence of both throughout the war.”
Stewart’s father, Alexander Stewart, slipped the 91st Psalm inside that letter. The first Hollywood star to enlist for combat duty, Stewart flew 20 missions in a B-24 Liberator over Nazi-occupied Europe — at a time when bomber crews were expected to die between missions eight and 12.
He came home a colonel and, decades later, retired from the Air Force Reserve as a brigadier general. He also came home with what we now call PTSD, a thinner frame and a deeper faith — one Movieguide® has chronicled at length.
That faith, biographers say, is the engine under IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. The George Bailey audiences fell in love with in 1946 was not the Stewart of the pre-war years.
Related: Jimmy Stewart: American Actor and Honored Veteran
Stewart wasn’t alone in the cockpit. Clark Gable, the King of Hollywood, enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1942 at age 41, grieving the recent death of his wife Carole Lombard.
Gable flew five combat missions as an aerial gunner aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress out of England the following year, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal. One 20mm flak round ripped through the flight deck and took the heel off his boot.
Then-Pvt. Audie Murphy didn’t need a publicist. He needed a draft notice.
The Marines and the Navy turned him away for being too small, so Murphy joined the Army — and became the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II. At 19, near the Colmar Pocket in France, he climbed onto a burning tank destroyer and worked its .50 caliber machine gun for an hour against an advancing German company. The Medal of Honor followed.
Murphy later starred as himself in TO HELL AND BACK, the 1955 movie based on his memoir, along with roles in THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE and about 40 other pictures.
Comedy got drafted, too.
Writer and director Mel Brooks served with the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion during the Battle of the Bulge, clearing land mines and laying bridges across icy German rivers. More than once, his unit dropped its tools and picked up rifles to fight as infantry — and took casualties doing it.
Charles Bronson, who would later loom over THE GREAT ESCAPE and THE DIRTY DOZEN, flew 25 missions as a B-29 Superfortress gunner over Japan in 1945 with the 39th Bombardment Group. He earned a Purple Heart for wounds suffered in combat — and a lifelong case of claustrophobia from those cramped gun turrets.
Then there was Marine Pfc. Lee Marvin, a scout sniper with the 4th Marine Division who took machine gun fire to the sciatic nerve and a sniper round to the foot during the assault on Saipan’s Mount Tapochau in June 1944.
In 15 just minutes, the company was reduced from 247 men to six, Warefare History Network said. Marvin, one of the survivors, recalled, “It was just decimation.”
He spent 13 months in naval hospitals before the Marines medically discharged him. The granite-faced toughness he later brought to THE DIRTY DOZEN and THE BIG RED ONE wasn’t a costume.
None of these men led with their service. They came home, ducked the cameras for a while and got back to work — and the war left its fingerprints on every movie that followed.
That’s worth remembering on Memorial Day. The holiday belongs, properly, to the men and women who didn’t come home — and the famous veterans above knew many of them by name. Whatever your family does on Monday, save a moment for the ones whose stories never made it to the big screen.
Read Next: Gary Sinise Advocates for ‘Struggling’ Vets Who Served After 9/11
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